October 2011 issue of Freedom's Phoenix magazine - fr33aid

Health Care Freedom – Are We There Yet?
By Karen Kwiatkowski
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LIKE a long trip
we may remember
from childhood,
Americans are wondering
when the
federal health care
trip we are on will
be over. In terms
of rules, regulation,
and the centralized government and insurance
systems, we are definitely not there yet.
Formalized health care in America employs over
14 million people, with another two million employed
in the insurance industry, and nearly a
million employees of the Federal Department
of Health and Human Services. More than 100
million Americans have their health care subsidized
as a tax-funded government entitlement.
The cost of tax-funded health insurance for active
duty and retired military families has nearly
tripled in the last decade, rising to $49 Billion a
year, nearly 10% of the Pentagon budget. The
latest government attempt to control Americans
and funnel more money into the healthcare and
health insurance industries seems to have been
written by insurance companies and the American
Medical Association, and includes a mandate
that all Americans purchase private insurance
or else pay additional tax and penalties
each year that they do not comply.
HHS proudly proclaims that it processes a billion
claims a year, from the 25% of Americans
who are on Medicare and Medicaid. Assuming
that fraction is 75 million Americans, that’s
over 13 claims a year from each one. Of course,
this includes thousands of fraudulent claims
each year, at $60 billion annually, approaching
10% of the overall health care spending in this
country. To this fraud, we must not forget the
fraudulent but lucrative maneuverings of the
pharmaceutical industry, and the creation and
promotion of brand new illnesses to be treated
with expensive prescription medication.
Most of us are already aware of the increasingly
militarized government–medical-insurance-pharmaceutical
complex. It’s Uncle Sam,
the National Proctologist, and it is frightening.
Tax threats and federal propaganda aside, in
fact drugs and vaccines are increasingly mandatory,
and more and more personal or familial
choices in health care are regulated by government.
Government attention is focused angrily
and aggressively on those choosing foods,
drugs, therapies and healing practices that fall
outside of government medicine, and hence the
government-medical-insurance racket.
The federales demand that we buy and ingest big
pharma’s subsidized drugs and vaccines without
question, but prohibit cancer patients from using
privately grown or purchased marijuana in their
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own homes. Our dead-broke municipalities are
criticized for ending fluoridation, because it is
part of a federal government created “market”
for an otherwise dangerous industrial by-product.
If a person seeks alternative care or treatments,
the government criticizes, and the subsidized
and protected health insurance industry
recoils. And forget about raw milk, raw anything,
or ever getting access to free-market food
that has never been inspected by a government
apparatchik. Even those with religious exemptions
to the massive and interwoven rules and
regulations are increasingly pressured to conform
to the state and its corporate mandates. In
2011, the first and fourth amendments are dead
letters. The state is our savior, and we own neither
our bodies nor our capital.
This regulated, constrained, government-ordered
and government-contaminated system is
for us today a modern version of the snake oil
salesmen of the nineteenth century frontier. Of
course, this is an insult to the original snake oil
salesmen, who only convinced their customers
to try their wares. Unlike Health and Human
Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and
former Monsanto lawyer Michael Taylor, Food
Safety Czar, the traveling salesmen of yore
never forced their customers to buy, consume
or be injected under threat of jail, committal to
mental institutions, confiscation of farms, businesses
and property.
What of health freedom, then, in this age of
America’s second serious experiment with National
Socialism? Like other freedoms we exercise,
health freedom starts at home, and in the
mind and heart of each individual. Most of us
understand that maintaining our health is indeed
an important part of self-ownership – and most
believe our physical body is something that we
own. If we are not sure, we might recall to the
13th Amendment, which forbids involuntary
servitude unless we are being punished for a
crime of which we have been convicted.
It follows that a starting point for health freedom,
and good health in general, must be, “No
involuntary servitude.” If this indeed is our
mental model, we would never submit to ailments
that have in many cases been dreamed
up by pharmaceutical advertisers, and we would
apply common sense to the idea that we should
visit doctors in order to suggest some medicine
we read or heard about. We should make up our
own minds about what might work to solve our
real and imagined health problems. We would
own our own minds, and involuntarily serve no
one – not the pharmaceutical industry, and not
Secretary Sibelius and Mr. Taylor. This goes
for our children and our families as well – they
are not government guinea pigs, and shouldn’t
be raised to be.
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